Have You Banked the Resources from STOP?
There are three reasons why growth is illusive for Plateau Businesses. The first reason is the lack of resources, which the first two sections of the book so far have been dedicated to. There’s literally thousands of tactics you can deploy to grow your business. Hundreds of books, websites, and blogs are dedicated to this topic. You’re probably already familiar with many of them. However, for Plateau Businesses, those tactics are mostly redundant as those tactics are resource hungry—like money and energy— that is, until you’ve recovered and banked time, money, resources, energy, and focus from our earlier Stop initiatives. The second reason is beautifully explained by the late Peter Drucker who said “We spend a lot of time teaching leaders what to do. We don’t spend enough time teaching leaders what to stop. Half the leaders I have met don’t need to learn what to do. They need to learn what to stop.”
Make the Plateau Busters Yours
The final reason for illusiveness of growth is trying ideas that may have worked elsewhere, but don’t work for you now.
As you read on, don’t oppose our Try this ideas. We have captured the ideas here—not necessarily as precise solutions for you to challenge or critique, but as parables to encourage you to find the parallels in your business. Your curiosity around your own thoughts will lead to ideas that will grow your business. We are interested in you implementing your ideas that come to your mind as your curiosity is sparked by what you read here. In other words, the Plateau Busters that are most likely to succeed are those that you devise inspired by what you read. We’ll call them your Plateau Busters.
Try This…New Customers through New Hires
What is the next natural step-change in your business: 20 percent more or 200 percent more over the next 5 years?
But wait…did you free up the time, money, resources, energy, and focus in earlier sections of this book to truly enable growth? If not, you’re not going to get the Plateau Buster growth you promised yourself. You’re really only going to tinker at the edges. So is that what you want? If not, please go to the back of this book, and take action on the notes you already made.
OK, so you did take action, already. Great, so now you are resourced to grow. You should have people capable of more or at least people able to manage more people—without simply becoming pen-pushers—when the volumes increase. You may still need to ask yourself: Are the premises large enough, and do you have enough equipment to make more? Are there other operational constraints?
If you can easily produce 20 percent more widgets, will your existing customers take them?
Of course not! Because if they could buy more, you already would be selling more, wouldn’t you? So, you will need more customers, probably beyond those gained with your 80/20 clear out in an earlier section. Should you think about hiring a new customer acquisition person, as it is probably you who still does all the selling?
If your widgets are on message and of their time, it would be possible to hire someone to start tele-selling them for you. It’s a fairly thankless task as they will undoubtedly be frustrated in trying to reach buyers inside organizations, and when they have reached the one with the order pad, more likely than not, they will be rebuffed. Nonetheless if they throw enough mud, some might stick and the person you engage will probably welcome a low basic with a significant commission incentive for new sales. And, don’t forget, do also let them try out on some of the customers you have lost over time—no, not the bad payers, but the defectors.
If, however, your widgets are mature items bought by mature buyers, you probably need a mature salesman (like yourself) to sell face to face. Great salesmen pick the companies they work for based on their own assessments of product and opportunities. They don’t respond to adverts.
Salesmen hired via an advert is clearly not succeeding where they are (or were). They ask for big basics and guaranteed commission to cover the long period before they succeed or, as is more likely, you lose patience with them. So our advice is not to use this route. Instead consider a variation on the above model—hire a former senior person of a rival supplier or substantial customer who is otherwise retired. They don’t want to work full time and therefore pay is not the only factor. They want to feel they are achieving something rather than sitting on their backsides. However, they don’t want to be deeply involved in the nitty gritty, and that overhead will fall back on you. What they really are is a rolodex of active buyers to whom they can open doors you never could.
Few senior people hired in such consulting capacities stay more than a year with any business—but in that year, their who’s who is yours for the plundering and of course, once exploited, you would hope to keep the customers much longer than the consultant.
To gain one, you need to be proactive, go gamekeeper-turned poacher, and seek to hire someone selling into you (or against you) who impresses. They will be expensive, but suitably motivated, generate sales that will lift your heart (and wallet).
An important footnote is these guys often also want a chunk of the ownership of your business as motivation. In our experience, any agreement should be in the form of share options which should vest over, say, a three-year period and disappear if they are no longer working with you. And if share options and vest are strange notions to you, get your lawyer to draw up an agreement. But whatever happens—no handshake deals—make sure it is all in writing.
Writing doesn’t necessarily have to mean an expensive trip to the lawyers. The chances are the document will be agreed, both parties will sign it, and it stays in a drawer until is ultimately redundant. But it must be unambiguous and attempt to foresee obvious potential future problems. And the web is full of templates and examples of almost every conceivable document—as we previously identified—so why reinvent the wheel when some or fewer dollars will do the work for you?
If widgets is not your game, how about an extra sales person to extend your hours? A waiter/waitress and a chef could give you a breakfast shift in each of your restaurants that you didn’t have before. A trainee veterinarian could be hired to do routine injections and medications beyond the hours you want to work yourself. As a landscaper, you could usefully employ someone to hand out fliers around the neighborhood of your last piece of work, showing what you have just completed.
Alternatively, if your service business is maybe a five-location tuition center spread across a major metropolitan city that relies on word of mouth for new students, then perhaps you ought to hire a part-time digital influencing person to extend your reach.
Try This…New Customers—Internationally
We suspect you are doing a trivial amount of overseas business with a buyer who found you rather than the other way around. The export market for widgets is huge. There are only two important barriers to you doing more international business: language and being paid.
You can export more than widgets. One of the authors worked with a university urologist professor to develop a computer program providing easy-to-read urinary analysis reports for a bioscience company. The professor later attending an international symposium mentioned the program and, hey presto! The author received an export order for the same software from 3,500 miles away—two sales, one piece of work. Can this become a repeatable channel?
Dealing with language, it is important you appoint an agent. The agent should be based in one of your intended markets and it is he/they who will be able to tell you what local regulations you will need to adhere to rather than you seeking to learn all the foreign regulations yourself. They will also be able to make suggestions for your product’s presentation to be attractive to local customers. Most important, they will open doors to prospective customers. It won’t stop you having to travel to meet prospects, but a good agent will use a block of your time to meet many prospects at one time rather than you making many separate single journeys. And of course they speak the local language.
As for being paid, you already know how hard it is to collect from domestic customers. Put in geographical separation, time difference, and possibly a language barrier and you might as well be trading with the moon. Many companies overseas are honorable and stick to trade terms and pay promptly, but there are equally any number who play on the remoteness from you and will allow your ignorance or lack of tenacity to overcome the distance and language differences to only ever pay your bill when they want more product. Our favorite way of dealing with this is to have two columns on your international price list: the price you actually want to achieve as a Cash with order price and marked up by 10 percent as the trade price. Only a fool, or a penniless customer, would go for the latter.
Finally, be very sure of both your customer’s terms of business and their country’s rules too. Many buyers expect to be able to and in practice do take payment discounts even when paying according to your terms and a lot of countries (particularly in Asia) like to take some withholding tax from any money remitted overseas. Then of course there is the exchange risk and the bank charges deducted by both the remitter’s bank and yours.
If you know what to expect from the deals you are going to be doing, you can price accordingly.
Try This…Let Others Do It
Licensing is the methodology of using a paper agreement to let someone else do something with your design and rewarding you for it.
Before you read on, take another gulp of air and promise not to say no to this or indeed any of this before you have looked at these opportunities with a fresh pair of eyes and genuine curiosity. And if your eyes are tired and jaded, how about a genuine fresh pair from a trusted friend?
That agreed, come back to the question: Why do you make widgets at all? Could you simply buy someone else’s, with a little smart packaging— done by the manufacturer on your behalf—sell them to your customers, and make a profit—without any infrastructure of your own, at all? And if you can, is that better than continuing with the hassle that caused you to buy this book in the first place?
Or could you pass your infrastructure together with a robust licensing agreement to some other country’s manufacturer who, with lower costs, can make them cheaper than you, both for you to supply to your customers and for them to supply to some of their own and to pay you a license fee on those latter sales?
Or finally, could you find a manufacturer in an appropriate piece of geography to manufacture in addition to you—both then to supply local markets of your customers? That may well be a better thing to do than for you to try and establish your own additional plant in a country you don’t properly understand, where the language is not familiar, and you have little chance of effective supervision—without giving up the day job.
Pause: Did you make notes of things in the Action This Today section in the back of this book? If not, please take this opportunity to review the prior pages to identify again any thoughts and ideas you want to follow up on.